1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image file processing apparatus, an image file processing method, and a storage medium which process an image file in which a photo image has been recorded.
2. Description of the Related Art
When an image is recorded as a file in an apparatus, such as an imaging apparatus, it is conventionally common to configure the image in a file utilizing the Design Rule Camera File System Standard (DCF Standard) or a file system compliant with Exif (Exchangeable Image File Format for Digital Camera) format used together with the DCF Standard.
Various improvement technologies have been devised to a process up to configuring the file. As one example, such a technology has been devised that, when main image data, non-compressed sub-image data, and compressed sub-image data are created and recorded in a memory card, a transfer time of image data to the memory card is accelerated for the main image data having a predetermined size or less by storing the main image data and the compressed sub-image data without storing the non-compressed sub-image data (Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Pub. No. 2000-261756).
As described above, regarding the file-configuring technology for an image, various technologies for improvement have been proposed.
However, the conventional file-configuring technology has been proposed based upon only main image data and sub-image data being contained in the same file for a single image. For example, regarding a plurality of continuous photo images, a panorama image created by synthesizing two or three images, and a plurality of images captured in multiple view-point directions, image files are created by the same number as the number of the images. Therefore, when the image files are managed collectively, a troublesome task for creating a management region other than the created image files in the memory to obtain association of the plurality of image files in the management region is required.